Development of an Automatic Air-Driven 3D-Printed Spinal Posture Corrector

Abstract

Billions of people are using smartphones and computers with poor posture. A careless attitude towards spinal posture could be dangerous for long-term spinal health, leading eventually to curvature of the spine. Ignoring this fact and its treatment at the early stage will significantly deteriorate spinal health and force surgical intervention. Instead of developing an automated posture-correcting system, the existing research mostly focused on a posture-monitoring system to inform the users via a human interface, e.g., Bluetooth-based devices. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel posture-correction method to automatically prevent spinal disease by facilitating proper posture habits. Specifically, we develop a fluid-driven wearable posture corrector, whose skeleton can be fabricated simply using a 3D printer, to estimate angular posture deviation using sensors and provide appropriate assistance to correct the posture habit of the user. Mounted sensors provide the degree of postural bending, and a controller regulates the appropriate signals to provide a friendly pulling force as a reminder to the user through a fluid-driven actuator. The skeleton with a fluid-driven tool is designed to mimic the motion of the spinal posture by activating the actuator, which injects (or releases) the fluid into (or from) the skeleton frame and regulates forces to reduce the angular deviation of the skeleton. The 3D-printed skeleton with a flexible rubber tube has been experimentally evaluated to ensure proper actuating mechanism through the adjustment of air pressure. It is found that, by applying air pressure in the range of 0 to 101.4 kPa, the skeleton is pulled back approximately 1 N to 7 N forces, minimizing the angle up to 12.44◦ with respect to the initial steady stage, which leads to a maximum posture correction of 32.55% angle (θ) of poor posture. From the above experiments, we ensure the functionality of the proposed posture corrector in producing backward forces to correct the posture automatically.